The Short History of a Prince (49 page)

The relatives stood on the flat of the land in front of Reverend Bentley, and the others fanned out up the hill. Francie had been enlisted to play a dirge from the hymnal on her violin. Concentrate on Francie, Walter said to himself. Don’t think about the purpose of the event. Notice her orchestra skirt, black and straight to the middle of her kneecaps, as well as the white shirt, buttoned at the neck and the cuffs, and the nylons and black pumps. What was different about her? The uniform was complete with the exception of the Oak Ridge symphony maroon blazer. It took Walter a few bars to realize that she was playing her instrument in tune. The music! “Take My Life and Let It Be,” the song that Joyce had allowed would be all right, as a concession to Jeannie. Walter had never heard his cousin play three consecutive notes in tune, and she was sawing away as if she’d acquired an ear for pitch. Here was another check for the plus side, better not to question it, to wonder how or why.

Mitch was behind them, lost somewhere in the throng among the young sycamores and the quaking aspens. You are nothing to me now, Walter thought. The Reverend was saying his opening prayer, praising the Lord both for his unfathomable ways and for the power of his love. You once saved my life, Walter went on, but so what? The drone of the motorboats and the shouts of the children jumping off the piers came across the water, blending with Bentley’s mournful tones.
You are nothing to me now
. It was easy enough to say those words. No difficulty stringing together a subject, verb, object, the complete sentence. Once the service was over and everyone had gone home, Walter knew he was going to have to set out, and it would be an unfamiliar landscape to travel through, a terrain that had no guideposts or trails, a country with mountains of glassy black stone and, beyond, the
uncharted waste. A place where a person so blithely said, You are nothing to me now. There was no returning to the village, to dear old Mother.

He watched the ducks sitting on the waves, rising and falling. Bentley was saying something about Daniel going on a ship over the rim of the world. That terrible emptiness rose up in Walter’s throat. Over the rim of the world. Daniel is gone, Walter thought, headed west, and the rest of us are left behind. Aren’t we? Are we all here? Roll call, he wanted to shout. Roll call! I think I’m accounted for, he said to himself. Joyce, present. Robert, yep. Susan, right beside him. If anyone wondered, snaky Mitch was way in the back. One person, only one, had left them and that departure had changed them all. He understood suddenly that the real sadness about death was the fact that there was no way to follow to the limit. Daniel’s body had been burned and was already ash. Over the rim of the world. Walter was going to choke, couldn’t breathe. He reached for Susan, found her hand and she pressed it, let it go, put her arm around him, nudged him close. Yes, that was it, something in her that held him in place, that allowed him to take a breath. What he’d do is try to remember, aim to keep the details clear for the rest of his life. Waking up Daniel was the single thing he had been able to do for his brother. On prom night, the Night to Remember, he’d slapped him about the ears and called into his face and jostled his frail arms. It wasn’t much, rousing Daniel so he could see Susan. It hadn’t required thought or much effort or a charitable heart. But it was something, a small deed that had perhaps made a difference.

He tried to imagine the year 2000, a number that sounded so white and clean and empty. Where would he live at the turn of the century when he was forty-three, and what sort of profession would engage him? Where would he be in ten years, five years? Twelve months? Another June. The same flowering shrubs bursting into bloom and smelling, again. What, he wondered, would keep his interest; what, if anything, could ever thrill him? There was no light in the beyond, not so much as a glimmer. No sign for a while yet that on June 5, 1974, his mother, well into her forties, would give birth to a six-pound baby girl named Lucy Rawson McCloud. In her honor Walter would pass out pink bubble-gum cigars in his European History class.

Mitch, in the front row, would thank him and Walter would say, “You’re welcome,” the sum of the words they’d exchange through the rest of high school. He’d spend the next summer walking the baby in the night after her feeding, checking her in her bassinet to make sure her back was rising and falling. By day he played the piano to her, he tried to teach her to roll over, and he pushed her down the street in her buggy with the air of a proud father.

Standing side by side at the service Walter felt as if he and Susan were married, in their misty future, as if they’d been together for twenty-five years, as if Daniel were something like their child, a boy they’d given up for adoption long ago and come to know briefly before his premature death. The idea came to him then that he’d trip along behind her, that he’d go to college in New York City, to study whatever he could fix his mind on, so he could be close to her, so he could watch her dance. Reverend Bentley had never met Daniel, and his eulogy sounded like an astrological description of a teenage boy born in the month of November. As far as Walter could tell, Aunt Jeannie was the only one who could not restrain herself, who was crying. A different sort of ceremony might have served them all better, he thought, something that would shake them up, make them fall to the ground and howl. If he’d gotten whisked away into a straw hut for a bloody ritual he might emerge with wisdom and spirituality, and afterward there’d be song and dance, the suckling pigs and stories from the elders. Surely it was preferable to have high drama, the funeral pyre floating off, burning on the sea, rather than the calm of the present gathering, the pretending that over the horizon Dan was being received, that there was a fond welcoming.

Sue Rawson was picking the burrs off her sleeve. She’d have favored an Isadora Duncan type of dance, Walter supposed, girls in white tunics running around barefoot, paying homage to Diana. Joyce was looking across the lake at the one hundred steps that led to the top of the bluff. Walter hoped that all through Bentley’s gibberish she was thinking of the teapot she’d found on the fiftieth stair when she was a girl, a blue-and-white-speckled treasure she threw a fit over, had to have, and eventually carried back with her in the duckboat while her mother rowed. It was the one tantrum in Joyce’s oral history. He guessed that his father, head bowed, eyes closed, was trying to
obey, that he was doing his best to focus on the goodness, the strength and the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ.

After the benediction the crowd moved slowly up the hill, to the porch. Joyce had brought a sheet cake with mocha frosting and small red roses along the edge. There were lemon bars and chocolate chip cookies, macaroons and brownies, and the extra carrot cakes that Jeannie had drummed up well beyond the last minute. The pastel mints were in the silver dishes, and the green punch, made with ginger ale and lime sherbet, was in Grandmother’s crystal bowl.

Susan and Walter stood in the corner, watching the guests. “The last time we were here together,” she whispered, “was that amazing party for your aunt’s anniversary.”

“Aunt Jeannie’s busy bossing the kitchen help around,” Walter said. “The coffee is always so much better when you have two or three women standing over the urn. Dad was worried that she’d turn on her hostess charm, that she’d forget this wasn’t a golf outing. It’s a good thing she has a job so she’s out of the way.”

“Remember when she stood at the door in her wedding dress, waiting for everyone to look at her? I’ll never forget that. Will Mitch come to us, do you think? Oh my gosh, my mom’s talking to his mother. Should we—or I—approach him? Should I behave as if I’m an adult, as if nothing has happened between us, as if his being here is a peace offering? Or should I wait for him to take the lead? I wish he’d get back in his car and go home.”

She was chattering in the way Jeannie might have if she hadn’t been relegated to the scullery, but Walter didn’t think the talk was hurting anybody. There was a pleasant lilt to Susan’s voice. Let her warble on for the rest of the afternoon. He considered her questions for a minute. It had been nice of Susan to be outraged at Mitch in his behalf, but he knew he couldn’t expect her to keep up the stance indefinitely. On the plus side, being furious at Mitch for Walter’s sake had given her the upper hand in her future relations with the ex-boyfriend. She had loved a dying young man and she had evidence of Mitch’s disloyal, scumbag soul, both points that surely would serve to reinstate her virtue in his mind. She could have him any way she liked and there was probably no reason, except for the fun of coyness, to keep her distance.

“I think,” Walter said, in one of her pauses, “that if you’re up to it, you should go say hello, and I should take a walk and do the sort of thing people do when they stroll in the woods. Maybe I can come up with some meaningful new saying, something like ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ ”

“You should never let bygones be bygones, you know? Not after he laughed at you.”

“I’ll never forgive him, then, if I have your permission.”

“It’s just that you can tell he feels like a dope, standing out there with his mom.”

“Uh-huh,” Walter said.

“And it wouldn’t take that much for me to say something.” She gave Walter a peck on the cheek, a token of her affection for the fifteen minutes they would be apart. “Good-bye,” she said.

He walked down to the lake without looking to see if the old twosome were reunited. Mitch had once, and for some unknown reason, given him a moment of—what? Walter supposed he could call it a moment of unutterable loveliness. Where that tenderness had come from out of the cold night he didn’t know. He felt a flutter in his chest, a sign that his wounded heart was still inside of him and up to the usual tricks. Maybe that February night in the bushes was another thing, besides living and dying, that he’d never understand. One foot in front of the other, he said to himself. Left, right, left, right, down the hill. Daniel had had plenty of affection and devoted attention. Walter could say—and who could tell, perhaps it was true—that Daniel had had a full portion, to the finish.

He could see Sue Rawson in the stretch of woods by the boathouse, wearing a straw hat, poking her nose into the last tattered blossoms of the wild apple tree. She nodded at him, and together they climbed the stairs to the upper boathouse. They leaned over the railings and they could see all the way up to the north end, where the canal went through to Hank’s Pond, and to the south end, the marshy place with the leeches, and across the water to the pastures in the next county.

“What are you going to do with yourself,” Sue Rawson said, “now that you’re not dancing? Will you take up the piano again?”

“Not formally,” he said. “No.”

There seemed to be such a long time ahead of him, days and months and years that would have to be spent in some way. What he wanted right then, he realized, was to be ten, in Sue Rawson’s bedroom, listening to opera, to Puccini. Madame Butterfly’s life had been a mystery to him when he was a boy, but it had become real to him in the last few weeks. She had to kill herself because she hadn’t been able to stand the thought of the years before her, all that time, without the one thing she wanted. If I could fasten on anything, he thought, something. One thing to want. A milk shake. A pair of new shoes. The days would fill up of their own accord if there was something to want.

“I’d like to stay here,” he burst out, like a child. He right away felt foolish for saying so, but it was what he could see to want for the next hour.

“This place won’t always be here,” she muttered.

“It will,” he said firmly. “It’s ours.”

Twelve

JULY
1996

A
s a student Walter had vowed never to be the type of distracted, halfhearted teacher who counted the days until the end of the school year. If he’d learned anything after nine months of experience in the classroom, he understood that his pledge was ill-considered, that even a tired nag picks up its hooves and plods after a carrot. Without the eye on that one sweet thing the old mare would buckle at the knees, fold up, quit. Walter had a calendar in his kitchen by the telephone and another on his desk in the classroom as well as his lesson-plan spiral and a leather-bound engagement book. He did not cross off the squares with indelible black X’s, but at any given moment he could have announced down to the respectable rough measurement of an hour how much more time he and the young people were required by law to attend Otten High. The golden sunshiny joy of his imminent release was tempered only by the fact that the month of June inevitably followed the end of May, no seven-league boots anywhere in sight to step over the thirty troublesome days that he would so much like to avoid.

No viable proposal had been put forward to save Lake Margaret, and Sue Rawson appeared firm in her resolve to sell the property. At Thanksgiving she had told the relatives that she expected to host a
June 1 meeting to settle the question of ownership. Walter hoped—in vain, he knew—that there was nothing really to worry about, that the family was only going through a melodramatic spasm for the sake of entertainment. Word had it that cousin Maxi had had the impudence to go to her aunt’s front stoop to plead her case through the screen door. The Grande Dame reportedly flicked the lock, as if Maxi might try to bully her way in, and said through the mesh that she had no sympathy for beggars and weepers. Francie had left her rich husband for a penniless graduate student, and if no one else had any money the family must face the consequences.